“Loving you was like going to war I never came back the same.” - Warsan Shireħ. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.” ― Stephen King, Hearts in AtlantisĦ. “I have not broken your heart-you have broken it and in breaking it, you have broken mine.” -Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heightsĥ. “The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart-hearts are made to be broken-but that it turns one’s heart to stone.” -Oscar Wilde, De ProfundisĤ. I'm a crumpled up piece of paper lying here, 'cause I remember it all, all, all too well.” -Taylor Swift “All Too Well”ģ. “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.” ―L. You break your heart, it hurts.”Īs she wraps up the audiobook recording of Heartbroken and mulls a new memoir, Pratt says she is grateful to the King’s MFA for helping her find “a whole different writing voice… It just nudged me into a whole different world. It’s not metaphoric… You stub your toe, it hurts. So, in fact, you can die from heartbreak. The discovery that our emotional pain follows the same neural pathways as our physical pain. Pratt says, “The science was what shocked me most. In the end, Heartbroken explores the literature, philosophy, and science of heartbreak. And so I started to shy away from making the focus too much on me.” After a conversation with an agent during the New York residency, she realized “the value of this book would be writing about the experience of heartbreak, not my experience of heartbreak-although of course that’s the thread that takes us through.” “Who the hell cares about me and my breakup?” Pratt says. ![]() ![]() ![]() “But I still wanted people to be able to take comfort from it, and to find solace in it by hearing my story and understanding that they’re not alone.”Īs Pratt worked with mentors Jane Silcott and Harry Thurston, the vision of the book shifted, becoming broader. “I did not want it to be ‘how to get over somebody,’ you know, like scented candles and a warm bath,” Pratt says. Her intention was to write a memoir-a book that could be helpful, without being self-help. After talking to Moncrieff, “I got it in my head, and I decided I could make something good out of something terrible-that I could write the story of it,” Pratt says. Then she ran into King’s MFA grad Helena Moncrieff (2016) at the library (they live in the same Toronto neighbourhood), and Moncrieff encouraged her to consider the creative nonfiction program.Ī longtime magazine journalist and book editor, Pratt has ghostwritten business books, done reams of service journalism (“the kinds of stories with the little icon of the scissors with the dotted line, like you might want to cut this out and put it on your fridge”) and published a memoir that, nearly 20 years later, she dismisses as a “pretty clunky early-in-my-career kind of book.”īut as a busy freelancer, it was hard to carve out time to work on a project like Heartbroken. “I guess you could say the book is the lemonade I made from the lemons of my breakup,” Pratt says.Īfter being dumped, Pratt wanted to write about her heartbreak, and took a memoir course in which she began to develop the idea. On January 28, 2014, Laura Pratt’s (2020) partner of six years ended their relationship out of the blue, at a train station, and “took his furious leave.” Nine years to the month later, her book Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition is being published by Penguin Random House Canada.
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